1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information handling systems and more particularly to Ethernet switching of PCI Express Packets.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
It is known to provide information handling systems which conform to a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Express (PCIe) architecture. The PCIe architecture is a high-speed, serial, frame-based interconnect architecture. It is known to provide a PCIe information handling system with virtualization functionality. Virtualization provides a technique for hiding physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. The PCIe specification defines a plurality of virtualization constructs. These virtualization constructs include Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) and Multi Root I/O Virtualization (MR-IOV). The PCIe specification also defines a switching architecture to provide virtualization support with system architectures that interconnect multiple PCIe root complexes to PCIe input/output (I/O) adapters. This virtualization support is accomplished using a frame-based PCIe protocol.
There are a number of issues relating to PCIe switching. These issues include scalability, maturity and a relatively limited number of vendors implementing these devices. Additionally, the PCIe architecture is also a local switching architecture that is unable to scale or reach beyond localized servers. Thus the PCIe architecture is not well suited to a blade system type environment.
It is also known to provide large scale information handling systems, such as blade type systems which conform to an Ethernet architecture. Ethernet is a family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). The Ethernet architecture defines wiring and signaling standards for a physical layer, through means of network access at the Media Access Control (MAC) and Data Link Layer (DDL), as well as a common addressing format. Ethernet switching is a mature architecture and a very large vendor ecosystem supports the architecture.
It would be desirable to provide a system and method to encapsulate PCIe packets within Ethernet packets and thus emulate PCIe behavior over the Ethernet switching fabric.